The Internet revolution has sparked a host of new communities in which entities may participate. As a result, many transactions that formerly required face-to-face interaction may now be performed in a virtual space. The Internet has opened new markets to vendors and introduced new means of social interaction to individuals. Individuals may choose to transact business using personas within these communities.
As the number of Internet users and transactions have increased, however, so have the number of scams and schemes. As a result, Internet users are becoming increasingly wary of transacting over the Internet with unknown parties. One major factor is the difficulty of tracking the reputation of unknown parties. When a first party interacts with other parties, the history of past interactions informs the first party's current expectations. Consequently, the possibility of a reduction of reputation for poor behavior creates an incentive for good behavior.
Many Internet communities have attempted to deal with this issue by providing localized feedback mechanisms whereby transacting parties can supply feedback tagged to each other's persona in relation to the transaction. However, these systems are often tightly bound with pseudonyms or other system-specific identifiers, they cannot be used across different systems. Similarly, such reputation systems are not generalized, and therefore are typically only suitable to one type of reputation (e.g. “email spammer,” “hosts virus,” “makes bad comments,” “bad seller,” “bad buyer,” etc.). Further, these systems generally do not include verification mechanisms for reputation or real identities and the low cost to establish new pseudonyms and reputation leaves no incentive to maintain a clean reputation if that reputation is not transferred to newly established personae.
Reciprocity is the ability for each party in a transaction to report reputation-forming information (RFI) about the other parties in the transaction. Reciprocity provides an incentive for parties to improve the quality of the relationship and continue good behavior. Communities would benefit from reciprocal reputation systems that allow reputation information to be shared among communities while allowing the users to retain their anonymity within the communities.